Spelling an End to Orthographical Reforms: Newspaper Response to the 1906 Roosevelt Simplifications

Abstract

IRREGULARITIES ABOUND in the spelling of English, and they have concerned men of letters since Shakespeare's time. Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, and Melvil Dewey, among others in this country, proposed various reforms, all highly individualistic and, in the main, not coming to much. Among newspapers too there have been sporadic, isolated attempts-sometimes crusades-for spelling reform, like Colonel Robert R. McCormick's simplifications at the Chicago Tribune, beginning in 1934 and abandoned finally in 1975. On the other hand, newspaper opposition was partly responsible for the failure of a comprehensive effort at reform made in 1906 with the moral support of President Theodore Roosevelt and the financial backing of Andrew Carnegie. In numerous ways. newspapers would have been among the prime beneficiaries of the 1906 reform, for the simplified spellings were all shorter and would have made more economical use of scarce news space, saved wear and tear on typesetting equipment, and facilitated headline writing. The newspaper opposition took two forms: an initial period of hooting and ridicule and a second period of more serious, detailed, and reasonable consideration. Earlier commentators on the Roosevelt reforms-including Mark Sullivan (1926-35, 3: 162-90), Eltin E. Morison (1951-54, 5: 378n.), the compiler of Roosevelt's letters, and the scholar Clyde H. Dornbusch (1961)--concentrated on the flashy excesses; Sullivan and Dornbusch attributed the demise of the spelling reform movement to the excesses. H. L. Mencken, in his American Language (1936, p. 400), ignores the significant second phase of newspaper coverage; Roosevelt biographers treat the issue only in passing, if at all. It was the second phase, however, that can much more appropriately be credited with derailing the movement. In the early twentieth century, the spelling-reform movement was coordinated by the Simplified Spelling Board, which had begun as an